Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

Had he winked? It happened so fast — a barely perceptible fluttering of the eyelid — that Laura thought for a moment she had imagined it, until he winked again.

“You have to keep this to yourself, Laura,” he went on. “But we select certain students in advance. The lottery comes after that. Are you particularly fond of kayaking?”

She shook her head. “Not particularly.”

“Fine, then I’ll make note of that.” He rummaged a bit through a pile of papers on his desk. “The other teachers who are going along are…that woman who teaches English, what’s her name again?”

“Miss Posthuma.”

“Right, Posthuma…and the third one is Harm. Harm Koolhaas, social studies. He’s okay. He had no problem whatsoever with giving the lottery a little helping hand.”

Laura was seventeen now, as her father had rightly noted. Grown men turned their heads and whistled as she walked down the street. It could be. It was possible. Jan Landzaat, history teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, was openly flirting with her. She barely had to do a thing. It wasn’t like being an actress who tries to get a role in a movie by going to bed with the director. It might’ve seemed that way a little, but only vaguely. It was actually something very different, she told herself. Jan Landzaat was not unattractive, he probably thought so too. There were rumors. He was new here, he’d only started at the Spinoza this year, before that he had taught at the Montessori Lyceum. There was a lot of contact between the students at both schools: friendships, relationships, they went to each other’s school parties. The rumors spread quickly, the way rumors usually do, with a kind of snowball effect. The Montessori had almost six hundred students, the Spinoza more than eight hundred. At the top of the hill the snowball was still very small and fit perfectly in the two hands that formed it and then let it roll; halfway down the slope it had already gathered so much snow that nothing and no one could slow it down. It started with the story that the Montessori Lyceum had suspended Jan Landzaat because he had been involved with one of the senior girls, then the story went on to say that the two of them had had plans to get married: the history teacher, people said, had been about to leave his wife and two little children. Then it was only a small step to Jan Landzaat’s wife coming home and finding the two of them on the couch, to Jan Landzaat’s wife barging into the classroom in tears to confront the teacher with his adultery — in the scene at the teacher’s home, in Laura’s imagination, his pants had been down around his ankles and the girl was the first to see the wife standing in the doorway, while he himself hadn’t noticed a thing. She had tapped him on the shoulder to warn him, but he’d gone on licking her throat for at least another thirty seconds. In the classroom scene the wife was toting a rolling pin, like in a comic strip or a B-movie, Mr. Landzaat had to climb out the window to avoid a beating. The rumors reached their zenith with stories about more than one girl filing complaints against the history teacher for pawing them. That was about a month after he started work at the Spinoza Lyceum. After that, someone — no one could remember exactly who — noted that it would be awfully strange for the Spinoza to simply hire a teacher who had committed such serious offenses at his former school. And just as they had gone from bad to worse, the rumors now turned and went the opposite way. If the worst was unthinkable, then the less worse must be based on falsehood too.

The snowball did not melt, nor did it explode against a tree trunk; no, from then on it grew only smaller and smaller. Like in a film run back frame by frame, it rolled to the top of the hill again, where it finally ended up in the same hands that had originally formed it.

In the meantime, did the history teacher’s reputation suffer under all this? Not really. At least not among the students. True or untrue, Jan Landzaat was indeed a more than averagely handsome fellow, or in any case no dirty old man; no one knew exactly how old he was, but he couldn’t have been much more than thirty. Laura had seen him one time with his wife, she had come in the car to pick him up on a Friday afternoon. She remembered how Mr. Landzaat had leaned down to kiss her on the lips. Then his wife had opened the back door of the car and two little children had climbed out, two little girls, whom he picked up and hugged in turn. A nice young teacher with an equally nice young family. What could be more natural than for a teacher like that to feel closer to his students than to his gray-mouse colleagues in their dull slacks and sport coats? The juniors and seniors were allowed to call him by his first name, the way they also did with Harm Koolhaas, the social studies teacher who was Jan Landzaat’s friend. Harm Koolhaas also acted more like an eternally young adult. But still, it was different with him. Rumors went around about him too, albeit of a very different nature than those concerning Jan Landzaat. Harm Koolhaas, they said, had no wife or girlfriend, and wasn’t looking for a wife or girlfriend either. He was careful not to blatantly favor the boys in his class, but you can smell something like that miles away, David said once. It wasn’t that the social studies teacher was compromised by his predilections: times had changed. But it remained a soft spot — in an emergency situation it was something one could push against or pull on, and keep doing so until something in him broke or tore.

Jan Landzaat had asked her how she was doing, whether everything was all right at home. For a moment, she had considered confiding in him. Considered telling him something about her father; the history teacher, after all, was an expert in the field of real or fabricated rumors. About the incident at the restaurant, for example, the moment when her father had leaned across the table to kiss her on the cheek. How he had gloated over people’s glances and the whispering — people who were not famous like him, people who had to go through life with an unfamous face. At the moment it happened she had been too bewildered to react, but later, in her room, she had played back the whole scene in her mind, over and over. Her father had enjoyed the fact (he found it fantastic) that those people might think something other than that he was there having a grilled-cheese sandwich with his nearly full-grown daughter. Without asking himself for a moment what Laura thought about it. And she saw the problem with her own attitude right away too. After all, wasn’t it childish of her to make such a big deal out of it? She imagined how her father would respond. Oh, sweetheart, did that bother you? I never meant it that way. But if it bothers you, I promise that from now on I will never make a public display of how much I love my daughter. Then he would laugh it off, the same way he laughed off the stories and pictures in the gossip rags. I’m not allowed to kiss my daughter anymore, he would tell her mother at the table. And then her mother would laugh out loud too.

For very different reasons, she couldn’t express her doubts about her father’s behavior to her best friend either. To Stella. Stella would have thought she was crazy. Your father looks at me in such a normal way, Stella had told her. The way you look at a grown-up.

“I’d really love to go to Paris,” she said. “West Berlin doesn’t appeal to me that much, and the Ardennes would kill me. Do you think it’s possible, you think I have a chance, Jan?”

And as she was calling her homeroom teacher by his first name for the first time, she placed her left hand on the tabletop, not far from the sheet of paper with the various field-trip destinations on it; not far either from the teacher’s right hand, the fingertips of which rested on the bottom of that sheet of paper. Well-tended fingers, Laura saw, no flaky skin, neatly manicured nails.